Altocumulus lenticularis

It is just some words borrowed from some ancient language to describe a freak cloud formation looking like a lens floating in the sky.

It might explain many UFO sightings. Just to clarify UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. It always puzzled me why people thought these alien creatures were interested in our tiny pathetic little planet and why they would build a spacecraft shaped like a Frisbee to reach us.

(Space needle in Seattle.)

I enjoyed six years of my life in funky Seattle. I moved there after it wasn’t cool to move there. The grunge scene had already left town.

Before that there were a lot of UFO sightings shaped like saucers.

Yes, a disk or a saucer whatever, like the one you have under your fancy latté. They were served at Zeitgeist in Pioneer Square and at Vivace on Capitol Hill. I hope they are still around. Now fancy lattés are served all over North America.

However, back then the best lattés were served by baristas on street corners all over Seattle in the mid to late nineties.

(Latté art from funky Seattle.)

I used to work in downtown Seattle and I always got my latté from a local barista on the street nearby. While holding his new born baby he would brew a mean latté while reading “stock market for dummies” at the same time. That sort of summarizes the pre “dot com rush” zeitgeist at that time in Seattle to me.

I am glad I survived this dot-com rush. But who knows my favorite barista might be a VP at Amazon right now, a small company at the time. I could sight their headquarters next to Pill Hill from my loft.

I experienced this dot com hysteria firsthand but decided not to embrace it.

I chose to remain loyal to the C language and its C++ patois over the perl exotic messy slang that fueled most of the web back then.

Let us get back to UFOs and lenticular clouds.

Here is a sighting of a cloud above Mount Rainier which can be seen from Seattle. The mountain (dormant volcano) can be seen about ninety days a year when it doesn’t rain and no clouds obscure the mountain. The Seattleites even have a name for the sighting.

“The Mountain is out!”

That tells you how rare the event is.

(Two lenticular clouds above Mount Rainier.)

Compare this to the picture of the Space Needle in Seattle which is partly obscured by North-West fog shown above.

“Freaky dude there is a you eff oh in the sky!”

“No man it is just an altocumulus lenticularis.”

“Whoa?”

“That’s order created out of chaos dude.”

“Freaky dude there is a you eff oh in the sky!”

These clouds that look like smooth lenses are not your usual proverbial puffy clouds.

How do they form?

That is when science comes to the rescue.

Actually these lenticular clouds can also form over cities not only mountains. Cityscapes can also create the turbulent vortices shown in the figure above. For example here is such a beast sighted over the fine city of Dublin in Ireland.

(UFO in Doblin.)

How cool is that?

A series of improbable events: a catholic church creating an alien spacecraft on a sunny day in Dublin.